What’s new, baby? The trends that drive the global baby food market
25 Oct 2022 | Symrise
In this webinar, baby food innovators will learn about the latest trends shaping the market globally. Today more than ever, parents feel concerned about how they feed their babies. They want tasty and nutritious foods with safe and trusted ingredients, from farm to spoon. We will provide insights on how to valorize these trends into winning trusted products.
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Hello, I'm Gaynor Selby, senior editor of Food Ingredients First.
Welcome to today's webinar entitled What's New Baby?
The Trends that Drive the Global Baby Food Market.
This webinar is hosted by Food Ingredients First and sponsored by Symrise.
There will be 2 speakers today.
Marie Gilmont is baby food product manager, naturals, food and beverage at Simrise.
She leads the baby food portfolio of natural ingredients at SimRse globally.
Murray helps bridge the gap between agronomy, sourcing and quality, departments and key external functions to facilitate the commercialization of this specific premium range.
Before this, Marie led the baby food category at Diana Foods before becoming part of the Symrise group.
Also speaking is Nicholas Gribius, agronomy manager, naturals food and beverage at Symrise.
Nicolas supervises the Cymrise agronomy team in Europe and supports all Cymrise in-house agronomists worldwide.
In particular, he manages the Cymrise baby food range and has strong expertise in the control of agricultural contaminants.
Today Symrise will present to you the latest baby food market trends.
The first trends concern the needs of parents.
They want to make sure they get the best products that benefit their babies and the planet.
After that, you'll learn about the latest market trends relating to the wish to diversify the taste of baby foods while ensuring that babies grow healthily.
Finally, our speakers will share how Cymrise can support you in developing wedding products and answering market needs.
There will be time to address any questions you may have at the end of this webinar in a live Q&A with our speakers.
And this webinar will also be available on demand on food ingredientsfirst.com and a link will be sent via email to you after the presentation.
OK, over to you, Marie.
Thank you Gaynor.
Good morning, good afternoon to everyone.
So I'm going to begin with baby food market trends and the first trend I'm going to present is about food safety, quality and transparency that parents are looking for for their children.
Most parents worry about health implications of bad quality food on their babies.
They are significantly concerned by pesticides and contaminants that may contain industrial baby food, and they know it is linked to agricultural practices.
Also related to good cultural practices, we noticed that the organic trend is still significant in product launches and has been boosted with the COVID context.
In Europe and North America mature markets, most baby food launches are organic, 62% in North America and 56% in Europe.
In Asia Pacific, organic natural baby food products are in demand, and the trend is increasing.
Also, organic can find a place in emerging markets because it's a trusted certification and because also there is a mistrust for some parents and a lack of information on traditional brands in Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East Africa.
But what do we see concretely on the market?
We see more and more claims related to food safety and quality valorized on packaging.
Some baby food producers make reference to clean agriculture with more sustainable farming practices.
This is a case of RIC in China with the rice duck farming.
And other ones decide to use a third party testing body such as Cerebey in the US with a clean label project to valorize food safety on packaging via award logos, and these certifications have to be renewed every year.
Food safety, parent concern and expectations vary also by region in the world.
So in Europe, organic and clean label are really parents' priorities.
In the US there is a specific focus on GMO-free heavy metal residue.
And in regions like Asia Pacific and Latin America, organic is used more as a starting point.
So I would like to highlight the specific case of China where parents are even more concerned and they need extra safety and quality guarantees since the melamine incident in 2008.
On top of these concerns, transparency and traceability information allows to reassure parents as.
Parents are willing to pay more to get more transparency.
In the UK, more than 20% of parents estimate that it is worth paying more for baby food with ingredient variety named on the pack.
In Italy, parents say that knowing more about how baby food products are made would make them trust products more.
So really baby food companies have to demonstrate commitment to safety with transparent sourcing and production.
Here are two market examples illustrating transparency communication.
The first one is a Baby Bio brand in France with a raw material used from their own farm, and the second one is a Hero Beech nut Baby bar in the US with only 5 ingredients named on the pack.
Now, in addition to the established food safety pillar trend in baby food, we are going to see how the additional sustainability trend is becoming very important.
Sustainability and more precisely, carbon neutral claims are becoming a key focus for baby food brands.
Baby food is joining the fight against climate change to ensure their products leave the smallest ecological footprint.
In Europe, those claims have increased in the last 5 years in the baby food category with a significant jump seen in the last 12 months.
Baby food companies have started with a focus on claims related to packaging.
They are presenting 30% of launches this year.
However, packaging only represents a small share of emissions and parents become more aware that sustainability is not only related to packaging.
So next step is to focus on the product itself.
Actually, the specific product link claims are increasing significantly and they have almost doubled in the last year.
As a market example, let's mention Gerber's Plantastic range in the US with the launch of this snack product last April.
This range includes snacks but also pouches and meals and on top of being organic, and plant-based, the whole range is carbon neutral certified by the Carbon Trust body.
It's part of Gerber's commitment to become completely carbon neutral by 2035.
We have just seen that food safety and sustainability are strong trends in baby food, but because there is no reason for safe food not to be flavorful, we will see now how the taste diversity is becoming a focus for parents also.
Now, something that motivates parents lately is to offer their children a variety of tastes.
Some figures here.
More than 90% of UK parents think it's important to introduce babies to a wide range of different flavors, and 95% of Polish parents think it's important to ensure babies eat a variety of different colored fruit and vegetables.
It's known that enlarging the flavor palate of baby food allows to increase future food variety acceptance by the children.
Parents are facing the challenge to prepare baby food with a diverse range of food.
And the consequence of this trend is that innovation is focusing more on exotic, exotic meaning non-local fruit and vegetables and especially those that may be challenging for parents to find locally and prepare.
On top of this variety need, homemade baby food is a clear focus.
First of all, the World Health Organization recommends homemade baby food, and we all know that COVID pandemic has clearly boosted this trend.
In the UK, parents giving homemade food daily to their babies increased from 65 to 74% in the last two years.
So home cooking claims in packaged baby food have increased from 2 to 12% in 4 years.
So, homemade trend represents a real opportunity for baby culinary aids, simplifying the cooking process and supporting this trend.
In the Chinese example here, the baby meal add-ons is an innovative emerging solution to enrich the homemade meals and can help to expand the baby food offer.
They have rapidly grown for a very small base.
Culinary aids are baby friendly and convenient, can be liquid or powder.
They help to introduce more flavor, enhance the flavor, and helps parents with children with poor appetite.
On top of that, in some cases, they can even be tailored to babies nutritional needs.
To illustrate the homemade trend and culinary aids, here are some examples of sauces and the seasonings.
Some vegetable stocks in Thailand in the UK or mushroom powder in China, and rice seasoning in Taiwan.
So after all, through food safety, sustainability or taste diversity, the final parent objective is to reach babies' good health in the long term.
So health and nutrition is everywhere in the global baby food trends.
So let's discover now additional specific health trends together.
So as parents want the best nutrition and healthy food for their babies, they pay attention to sugar content and other undesirable like additive salt and salt in the baby food and their negative effects on health.
Parents now check carefully the ingredient list of baby food products to ensure less intake of nasties and even no nasties at all with the cleanest clean label.
In the US, the excessive intake of sugar and children obesity is a real issue.
13% of children aged from 2 to 5 are suffering from obesity.
Brands are reducing unwanted ingredients, mainly sugars and salt.
In China also, added sugar has become a major concern in baby food that is a threat to children's dental health and taste development.
New product launches have less added sugar, but sugar content remains high, especially in biscuits and cereal.
Something to be noted here in China, the authorities put a legal limit of carbohydrate and fructose addition in new developments.
In terms of nutrition, the plant-based trend makes its appearance on the baby food markets following the adult food trend.
Plant-based food is perceived as healthier and more environmentally friendly.
It's targeting flexitarian parents looking for healthier and more sustainable options, and it's a premium concept that adds value to the product.
In the US, plant-based claims are increasing very rapidly in baby food.
One market example here is a brand Once Upon a Farm with a plant-rich meal made with quinoa, banana, spinach, with coconut butter and chia seed.
This trend is complementary to the fruit and veg intake trend that we already see on the market for a few years now.
The dietary guidelines for Americans show that nearly 90% of the babies aged between 1 and 2 are below the recommended intake of vegetables.
Also, 70% of American parents consider fruit and veg content it's an important purchase factor.
Baby food producers tend to incorporate more veggies into their products that helps to break children's sugar addiction and improve their dietary fiber intake.
Fruit and vegetable intake have other health benefits on vision and brain stimulation.
Having more fruit and veg in their diet is in line with the recommendations made by the American Academy of Ophthalmology.
Babies respond to bright colors from 8 to 86 to 8 months old and having more vibrant colors in their diet, such as colorful fruit and veg, beetroot, purple carrots, squash, not only makes the food appealing but also helps with brain stimulation.
It can also be part of a fun activity to be done with the parrots like colored fruit puree tubes to make you deserve more attractive in the US here on the left or the Korean example of colored cookie kit here on the right.
Finally, tooth decay is a public health problem among children, mainly caused by a diet high in sugar and starches.
Early childhood careers can have an impact on a child's overall health as they grow up, including pain and eating difficulties.
Tooth decay in young children can be prevented by avoiding sugary food and choosing preferably tooth-friendly products.
For instance, using more veggie ingredients is good for oral health, more than fruit actually, and removing added sugar or formulations also helps.
Almost half of the baby juices and drinks launched globally in the last year are showing a no added sugar claim.
So here we took the example of a vegetable-based snack in the US and a zero sucrose teething risks lunch in China.
So, now that you have a better understanding of the latest trends driving the baby food market, I would like Nicola to highlight how SimRice's in-house expertise in agronomy and quality answers parent concerns in terms of food safety, sustainability, and traceability.
Thank you, Marie.
SIMRS has been indeed fully devoted to provide safe and nutritional solutions to the baby food industry for over 30 years.
From the agronomy side, we have started in 1988 with one agronomist, and 24 years later.
We have now a team of 9 agronomists dedicated to baby food in dark green on the map you can see here, among the 15 agronomists working within Simrise.
As you can see, these agronomists are located in Latham and Europe, near the factories where we produce our baby food ingredients.
What are our key?
Priority The first one is to guarantee the food safety and quality starting from the field.
For that, we are working on two pillars.
Firstly, we build close relationships with our suppliers.
As you can see here, fresh raw material farmers represent more than 50% of our baby food supplier.
Our work also consists of a rigorous procedure of baby food raw material approval that I will describe later.
Let's focus on the first pillar, which is based on a strict selection of baby food farmers and a close follow-up of the crops.
Our process starts with an in-field agronomist's audit for the pre-approval of each baby food farmer.
Then the farmer is classified through a questionnaire in our summarized proprietary portal.
This leads to a contract signed between Simrise and the farmer.
This contract includes instructions for the crop, such as the list of inputs allowed, pesticides, fertilizers, the choice of the variety, the sowing date.
And if necessary, storage instruction.
Finally, we are evaluating our suppliers each year on their pesticide results, compliance with ergonomic instruction, quality, supply performance, and commercial relationship.
Regarding the baby food raw material approval, the process involves taking a representative sample of raw material from a field or a group of fields with the same agronomic management and environmental conditions.
We then performed.
A preprocessing analysis on a pilotron with around 900 different contaminants analyzed, such as pesticides, heavy metals, mycotoxin.
And processed contaminants to ensure the safety and the quality of the baby food ingredients.
Finally, the quality and ergonomy team work together to approve or not the selected baby food raw material batch.
The work of the agronomy team goes beyond ensuring.
Food safety and quality.
The 2nd carol of the agronomy team.
Is to limit the environmental impact of agricultural activities.
For that, we pulled on 2 levers with our baby food farmers.
One, to improve the carbon footprint by reducing carbon dioxide emissions during cultivation.
And increasing carbon sequestration in the soil.
And the second to develop regenerative agriculture practices.
Let's now see how we support our baby food farmers to improve their carbon sequestration.
First of all, we encourage them to maintain grassland, forests, and wetland because, as you can see on the slide, this type of land enables a high carbon sequestration.
And for the crops that concerns us, for orchards.
Our farmers maintain permanent grass cover between the rows, and for arable crops, we are working throughout the rotation to increase soil sequestration in the for the carbon.
Let's take an example of a babyfoot carrot farmer in the north of France.
On the left here you can see.
The current situation with a five-year rotation with the sugar beets, carrot, wheat, green pea, and wheat again, that is very common in this area and leads to a decrease of the carbon stock in the soil.
On the right, you can see that by extending cover crop every year and applying more organic matter.
We can increase the carbon stock by 2 tons per hectare after only 5 years.
So more cover crop and more organic matter application, in addition with nutrient management.
Mainly nitrogen, crop diversification, very limited pesticides application, and optimization of the irrigation.
Bring us to regenerative agriculture, which allows more biodiversity, better soil water retention, and less soil erosion.
But implementing best practices is not enough, we must also measure the impact through indicators.
For that, we have a dedicated digital tool which facilitates instant traceability via online data entry.
It allows us to exploit data in order to calculate indicators, pesticide pressure, carbon footprint.
It also allows us to control the compliance with our specifications.
Now you may wonder how you can leverage our sourcing and agronomy expertise to reassure parents.
We can imagine a QR code on the front pack that parents can flash that will be leading to your website.
This page could share information on, for example, our best agricultural practices and our close relationship with belly fruit farmers or on high quality standards.
This was only a quick overview of our upstream expertise.
I now let Marie share with you how we can support this solution, answering all these trends at a portfolio level.
All right.
Thank you, Nicolas.
As you may know, the baby food market is subjected to a very strict regulatory context on finished products for babies from 0 to 3 years old.
So based on that, we define our own baby food grade, quality range of ingredients and we commit to comply with customers quality specifications.
We aim to obtain the lowest possible levels of pesticides and chemical contaminant residue.
Also a very clean microbiology, allowing their use in dry baby food mixes without further heat treatment and of course no foreign bodies for food safety.
We manufacture our products in a baby food customer audited and approved factories in our facilities located in Latin America, Europe, and Asia Pacific.
At Sim Rice Food and Beverage, we propose various ingredient portfolios.
First of all, our historical Diana food portfolio of natural ingredients.
Here you will find fruit, apple, pear, red fruit, orange, and of course banana as a star product or even specific health position ingredients like Acerola.
Also vegetables from spinach to carrots, green beans, but also red bell pepper, pumpkin or onion, and depending on your region, we know that some raw materials will be perceived as standard or more exotic.
Also, chicken-based products are part of this portfolio.
Then we can add to the, to this, the, the flavors portfolio, including natural that highlights seam rice taste competencies.
Vanilla, of course, is a key tonality for baby food, and I would like to draw your attention also on the taste balancing and masking solution from Sim Life Solution.
We offer a wide range of formats, flakes, pieces, crunches, powder, dry blends, puree for for banana only, and even broths of fat for chicken.
So you can get the adapted form suitable to your specific application to take advantage of the ingredient key benefits.
I will name here some examples, a raspberry crunchy without sucrose, to get a visual and taste impact in an infant cereal, for example, or a fruit powder to coat a baby extruded snack.
It could be banana puree for fruit dessert.
Also chicken broth or vegetable blends for culinary prepared meals.
Vanilla flavor for grain nut milk, and taste modulation solution to mask plant-based meal of nuts.
Through this presentation, we have tried to give you an overview on the latest baby food market trends and how SimRice can support your innovation.
We have a 30 year history in the baby food market.
Over the years, we did our best to reinforce our expertise in baby food quality, food safety, and nutrition, and our objective has always been to align our offer and innovation pipeline with the latest market trends.
Today Simrise is your partner of choice for baby food to support you in healthy baby solutions without compromising taste.
Because we are conscious of the context today, we are also able to support you in the cost competitiveness challenge we are all facing lately.
So please do not hesitate to contact our teams for more details or questions, and I thank you very much for your attention.
OK, great presentations there from Marie and Nicholas.
Thanks very much for sharing your insights, guys.
Now let's move on to the question and answer session, part of the today's webinar, where we're taking questions from the audience.
There's been some very interesting questions coming in already.
So thanks to our audience for participating.
So let's.
Let's look at the first question.
So what are the latest innovations that you're working on?
Marie, would you like to take this question, please?
Yes, of course.
Thank you for, for this question.
So about, innovation, on the ingredients side, we focus, first of all on the health pillar, of course, with, for example, a recent launch of an, organic baby food Acerola powder, which includes 14% of, natural vitamin C.
These ingredients, can allow a claim on the final packaging like source of, a natural vitamin C in an infant cereal, for example, depending on the amount you put on the recipe, of course.
Still, on health, we, have worked on, chamomile water extract in powder, to be used in, let's say as a calming, ingredient in the nighttime, let's say a baby food.
Still, still on fruit, we have launched a few weeks ago also a crunchy, a little piece of raspberry which doesn't include sucrose but only fructo oligosaccharide force.
It's a new carrier we are using, so it's quite innovative also.
What else I can name you, maybe on the veggie side, we take advantage of our taste and culinary expertise in-house to, to apply and to develop baby food grade veggies like mushroom or garlic that naturally can boost the taste of the baby food.
And, and we are exploring also more on the veggie side to to, to go on the, and to, to address this plant-based trend, , the, all the pulses and in particular sourcing of organic chickpea we have in Latin America.
That would be, I would say the, the latest, the latest innovation.
OK, thanks for outlining those innovations.
Let's move on and take another question.
This one's really about inflation and cost increases.
Somebody asked what solutions do you propose to face or to combat inflation and cost increases.
Murray, perhaps you would like to take that one also.
Yes, sure.
Of course, we are all facing the same issue, so we know that cost effectiveness is a, is a priority for all of us.
And we have to fight against this inflation and energy cost decrease, for example, to, to, to fight on, on that and to, to propose solutions, we have different levels, levels.
First of all, we, we try to select raw material with a high bricks.
So, and even we can ask to adapt the harvest time to reach a high BRICS, meaning that it will be less costly from an energetic point of view to dehydrate.
That could be one of the actions.
Another one is also to, to be careful and select the regions where the, the, the sourcing of some fruit or vegetables are more affordable.
I have in mind, for example, a strawberry from Latin America compared to, to Europe and we have the facilities there, so it could be processed just nearby the sourcing.
And of course, another another level would be to adapt our own recipe, just putting less fruit or vegetable in our own flake or peas or crunchy, more career, less fruits.
Of course, quality is not the same, but the cost affordability will be, will be here.
Right.
OK, good stuff.
Moving on to the next question.
As a key baby food supplier, what are your sustain sustainability objectives?
I know you spoke about some sustainability.
So perhaps Nicholas, you could take this one.
Yes, OK, regarding sustainability, we have two main objectives for 2025.
The first one refers to responsible sourcing with the objective to have 100% of our main raw material suppliers.
Assessed according to responsibility criteria like labor, human rights, business ethics, and procurement.
This supplier represents around 90% of our raw material purchased, and the second objective refers to sustainable agriculture with the objective to have 100% of our strategic biological raw material.
Certified or verified as sustainable and in parallel we are working on our agronomy and sustainability roadmap for our main species banana, carrot, strawberry, acerola, tomato, and onion.
Right.
OK, thanks.
So we've got some questions now coming in about trends.
Largely what trends do you see becoming the most important in the years to come in the future?
So back to you Murray for this one.
Yes, sure.
About the trends, in my, my opinion, first of all, health will, is here and will be here in the, in the future because it's a very established and very important, beginning with the milk, baby milk segment.
Of course, but I think sustainability is maybe newer and, and the holistic approach of sustainability will be really a must have, I think in the future because it can boost really the consumption of, of baby food.
If you have the traceability from farm to spoon, if you have good agricultural practices.
Also, an ethical way to produce, for, the ways of production of, of your, of your product and also, other ways to limit, the carbon footprint, so transformation nearby the sourcing and also sustainable packaging.
So the whole pack, I think it's important for this 30 trend.
Last but not least, I think it's important to, to, to say also that the homemade trend that we spoke before it will be will be important also in the future.
We, we, as industrial, we have, we don't have to fight against that, but you have, we have to ease and everything that can ease this process of homemade food will probably grow in the future.
Right, OK.
I think we've got time now for a couple more questions from the audience.
So let's look at the differences between organic and baby food grades.
Nicholas, can you take that one please?
Yes, in, in, in, in two words you can say that organic is a certification of means, while baby food grade is an obligation of results and with more details, organic farming is based on a yearly external audit.
Strict rules for agricultural practices, process, storage, chemicals are not allowed for organic, and the presence of prohibited substances in an organic product.
Constitute a suspicion of violation of these rules and in this case it's necessary to determine the cause and the origin of the of the contamination.
And if the suspicion can be dispelled, The organic statute status will be will be maintained as Marie mentioned, baby food grade refers to a ready to sell final product.
And it is about quality standard to comply with analysis proofs on pesticides and contaminant residues.
OK, good stuff.
Sticking with you, Nicholas, I think for the last question, for the final question now.
Can you supply ingredients compliant with the US legislation for baby foods?
That's a that's a good question.
Yes, we have presented the baby food, the raw material approval.
We also have a rigorous procedure for the release of the finished of the finished product, taking into account the requirements of our customers and The local requirement of the country of destination.
If the country of destination is US, we will take into account the regulation, the US regulation.
I can also answer to Denise.
She has a question about heavy metals.
This is the Same on the pilot step, we analyze pesticides and heavy metals and for the release of the finished products we also analyze heavy metals and we comply with the requirements of the customer.
For sure.
OK.
Thank you guys.
I think that's just about all we have time for for today's webinar.
Thanks again to everybody involved, especially you two, Murray and Nicholas, our, our speakers.
Before signing off, I'd just like to remind you that all questions that we didn't have time to take today will be answered via email.
And also don't forget to check your inbox shortly for an on-demand version of this webinar.
OK, thanks again to everybody and goodbye.
